This dissertation presents a critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of the fields and practices of cultural production through an examination of the case study of independent theatremaking in Ireland between 1990 and 2007. Based on both a theoretical analysis of field-and-practice theory derived from Bourdieu and an ethnographic study of the ways that Irish theatremakers and arts policy workers make sense of their practices, this work seeks to further our understanding of cultural sociology in theatre studies and more generally. It also aims to sketch a detailed and accurate portrait of the Irish theatrical field useful to theatremakers and policy workers alike. The first chapter begins with an overview of current sociological methods in theatre studies and suggests that they too often lack focus. It puts forward a proposal for one way that theatre sociology could proceed. It specifies this method through an examination of field theory and the notion of ‘practical intelligibility’ borrowed from the Wittgensteinian social theory of Theodore Schatzki. It contrasts this approach with ‘textual methods’ which take as their object not theatrical practice but various theatrical phenomena that it reads as if they were texts. Included in this category are those methods which see theatre as a subset of either literature or performance generally. In doing so, the chapter engages with Bourdieu’s own work on literature as well as the performance studies tradition of Victor Turner and Richard Schechner and specifically contrasts the approaches of Raymond William s’s cultural studies and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. After differentiating Bourdieu’s thought from these alternatives, it goes on to discuss the dynamics of Bourdieu’s particular theoretical project, and in particular, his scepticism towards the ability of formal philosophical discourse to capture the reality of lived practice. It highlights a key and problematic element of Bourdieu’s social thought: the notion of meconnaissance (misrecognition), which insists that practitioners are necessarily unable to see the truth of the practice in which they are involved. After examining a few attempts to combat misrecognition that Bourdieu finds unsuccessful, it notes that Bourdieu’s commitment to a critical sociology requires him both to see misrecognition in the field and be unable, as an intellectual, to do anything about it. The chapter will close with the suggestion that artistic fields, especially those that are dependent on a central planning and funding authority like the Irish theatre, might provide a counterexample to the necessity of misrecognition. The second chapter takes up that challenge with a examination of the Arts Council of Ireland’s efforts to shape the development of the theatrical field through its policies and practices, especially the Arts Plans of 1994, 1999, and 2002. It surveys the history of Irish state intervention in the theatre and the consolidation of power by the Arts Council and political developments that led to the Plans’ formation. It examines the Plans’ language and the history of their implementation and demise. It attempts to assess their success through a statistical survey of funding data for the Irish theatre since 1990 and a set of interviews with current and former arts policy makers. As this approach is unable to explain the observed data, the chapter proposes that Arts Council funding serves as a form of formal approval from the state. The means by which the Council conveys this approval, and how effective it has been in doing so, are analyzed, and examines how even with this power, the Council is unable to achieve its goals. It is noted that Council employees were aware of the gap between their professed policies and their implementation of them. The chapter proposes that this policy work should therefore be seen as a “third practice” in the theatrical field, next to theatremaking and theatregoing. The third chapter uses a survey and set of long-form interviews with Irish theatremakers to sketch out the practical intelligibility that undergirds their work. The key framework used in this sketching is the notion of multiple capitals grounded in a field’s doxa. The chapter identifies three primary capitals relevant to Irish theatremakers: funding (as a form of approval from the Arts Council and not simply money), development (that which will be useful to the Irish theatre of the future), and collegiality. It examines the nature and means of distribution of these capitals and the means by which they are contested. It looks at their overlap and conflict through the notion of niches that companies are expected to fill, and the means by which they embrace or reject that forced location. It closes by noting that the Bourdieusian notion of misrecognition is not to be found in the field as observed. The conclusion begins by showing that misrecognition is not present in the ways that Bourdieu’s theory demands. It traces this problem to the distinction between the sens
practique and the sens logique, and suggests that the case study of the Irish theatre provides evidence that this distinction is unsustainable. It suggests that while there are meaningful distinctions between practices that affect what can be articulated within them, practical actors are cognizant of these distinctions and can use both logical and practical tools to make use of them as their needs demand.